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A United States Marshal walks into a Stanford Financial Group office building in the upscale Galleria District of Houston February 17, 2009. Marshals entered the firm's buildings Tuesday morning and the company is now "under the management of a receiver," according to a sign taped to the window of the group's Houston headquarters. U.S. authorities charged Texas billionaire Allen Stanford and three of his companies with "massive ongoing fraud" on Tuesday as federal agents swooped in on Stanford's U.S. Headquarters. REUTERS/Donna Carson (UNITED STATES) - RTXBQNS

Giuseppe Macri

A Florida judge has thrown out a case examining a state police department’s secret phone spying program after U.S. Marshals seized documents detailing the program’s technology from the station.

State circuit court Judge Charles Williams had no choice but to toss the American Civil Liberties Union’s request for records detailing the department’s use of classified anti-terrorism phone surveillance technology, as the court has no authority over federal agents.

Stingray is the name of a specific product manufactured by the Florida-based Harris corporation, but has become a blanket term for international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) catchers, which simulate cellphone towers to trick mobile phones into connecting with them and disclosing locations, calls and texts along with other potential private data.

The ACLU filed a request for public records detailing Stingray use in a case investigated by Sarasota detectives, and had an appointment to review the records on the same day they were grabbed by the Marshals Service, which claimed they belonged to the federal government.

“This is consistent with what we’ve seen around the country with federal agencies trying to meddle with public requests for stingray information,” Wessler said in a Wired report. “The feds are working very hard to block any release of this information to the public.”

“We’ve seen our fair share of federal government attempts to keep records about stingrays secret, but we’ve never seen an actual physical raid on state records in order to conceal them from public view,” the ACLU wrote in a blog post following the incident.

Florida ACLU Vice President Michael Barfield said they plan to fight this week’s court’s ruling.

“I can guarantee you that we will move to unseal them and we also are evaluating our options in terms of appealing the judge’s decision because we never had an opportunity to address a critical factual issue in his ruling,” Barfield said in an Ars Technica report, alleging that because the records were held in a state police department, they fall under state jurisdiction as opposed to federal.

“When the government goes to such lengths to keep the public in the dark about its warrantless spying on citizens, then the requirement that courts approve of government searches is rendered pointless,” Barfield said in an e-mail. “Both the federal and local governments need to respect open records laws so the public knows what police are doing in their name.”